中村佐知子（東北大学）

YouTubeを英語の授業で使用することは、今ではそれほど珍しくなくなりました。授業に少しアクセントを加えるために、YouTubeを使用するという先生方も多いのではないでしょうか。私自身、現在はカリキュラムの都合でYouTube番組を使用することはありませんが、以前は大学の授業で10分程度のYouTube動画を頻繁に使用していました。その際に気をつけていたのは、「できるだけ学生が興味を持てそうな動画を使用すること」と「動画視聴の時間を単なる息抜きにしないこと」です。動画選定については、事前に興味があるトピックをアンケートで調査するようにしていました。

授業でよく使用していたのは、『Paolo from TOKYO』の「Japan Day in the Life Series」です。

Paolo from TOKYO – Japan Day in the Life Series

就職を控えた大学生にとって、社会人の生活は非常に興味深いもののようでした。こうした動画を授業で使用することで、教材以外の英語に触れる機会を提供し、また、使用されている語彙やフレーズを紹介することで、少しでも英語学習に繋げることを意識していました。

学生から非常に好評だった動画の一例がこちらです。

【朝から晩まで完全密着】バンダイナムコスタジオ社員の1日https://youtu.be/e_TxH59MclA?si=Cx2dJmUWvts3Bhcv

TOCIC Service List 1.2（https://www.newgeneralservicelist.com/toeic-service-list）で調べると、この動画には、以下のようなTOEIC頻出単語が含まれることが分かります。

これらの単語が動画内で使用される際に、一時停止して意味を確認したり、発音練習やディクテーションを行ったりするだけでも、学びの機会に繋がります。さらに、「授業の最後に単語を復習する」「その後の授業でも復習を繰り返す」など、継続的に取り組むことで、記憶の定着を意識した学習に繋げることもできるでしょう。

また、この動画には次のような文も使われています。

How long does it take for you to get ready for work?

How long did it take to develop this game?

これらの文は、ディクテーションや音読練習、さらには定型表現「How long does it take for you to do?」「How long did it take to do?」を使った文の作成練習にも応用できます。

さらに、この動画には、使用頻度が高いとは言えないものの、以下のような興味深い単語も含まれています。学生がこうした単語にも意識を向けることで、英語への興味が芽生えるかもしれません。

super packed「とても混んでいて」

burnables「燃えるゴミ」

non-burnables「燃えないゴミ」

honor system「自己申告システム」（オフィスの置き菓子の説明に使用されていました）

YouTube動画のauthenticな素材を楽しみながら、語彙やフレーズもしっかり学習する。「楽しい」と「英語力がつく」のどちらも諦めない授業づくりを、これからも心掛けていきたいです。

濱上桂菜（立命館大学）

親しい人が悩んで困っている時、何とか声をかけたいものですよね。

今回はそんな時に役に立ちそうな映画のシーンを二つご紹介します。

・映画「SING シング」

I know you’re sad right now and probably afraid to try again (…)

今は悲しくて頑張る気にもなれないと思うけど …（省略）

But you told me…”don’t let fear stop you from doing the thing you love.”

でもあなた言ってたでしょ 「恐怖に負けて夢を諦めるな」 と

大切な人が悩み苦しんでいる時には、相手が独りぼっちではないことを伝えたいですよね。そんな時には、まず相手の気持ちに共感するのが大事と言われています。上のセリフでも、まず、I know you’re …の部分で相手の感情に共感しています。そして、その後にBut を使って慰めの言葉をかけるのです。

このセリフの間に目線をどこに向けているかにも注目してみましょう。I know you’re …の部分では目線を相手からそらしていますが、but 以下のところでは相手の方をしっかりと見ています。つまり、本当に伝えたい内容は but 以下の内容と言えるでしょう。この目線の使い方も、人を元気づけたいときの大切なポイントなのではないでしょうか。

・映画「インサイド・ヘッド」

次のシーンは Sadness が Bing Bong を慰める印象的なシーンです。

（この映画は、とある女の子ライリーの頭の中で展開する、キャラクター化した感情たちや空想人物の冒険物語です。）

（Bing Bongは、大事にしていたカートのおもちゃを失ってしまい、悲しみに暮れています。）

Bing Bong: It’s all I had left of Riley.

「ライリーとの唯一の思い出の品なのに」

Sadness: I bet you and Riley had great adventures.

 （カートを使って）「あなたとライリーは大冒険したのよね」

Bing Bong: They were wonderful. Once we flew back in time. We had breakfast twice that day.

「素晴らしかったよ。時間を遡ったこともある。その日は朝食を2回食べたんだ」

Sadness: That’s sounds amazing. I bet Riley liked it.

「すごい。ライリーもそれは喜んだでしょう」

Bing Bong: Oh, she did. We were best friends.

「そうとも。僕たちは親友だった。」（涙を流す）

Sadness: Yeah. It’s sad.

「そうね。悲しいね。」

Sadness は、辛く思っている相手に共感しています。I bet … （きっと…だ）や、 It’s sad. （悲しいね） という表現を使って共感していますね。しかし、驚くべきことに、ここでは一つも具体的な慰めの言葉をかけていません。 But を使って、「だけど、楽しい思い出は心に残ってるでしょ」などの慰めの言葉をかけていないのです。

立ち位置やジェスチャーも印象的です。Sadness は、悲しむ相手と向かい合うわけではありません。相手の横に並んで座り、優しく相手の手に触れています。つまり、相手と同じ方向を向いて、近くにいることをそっと伝えているだけです。

大切な相手をなぐさめる方法は、もちろん状況、人間関係、文化などによっても変わってくると思います。しかし、相手が本当に辛く思っていて、どんな声掛けをしたらいいのかわからない時には、もしかしたら Sadness がしたように共感して寄り添うのが唯一できることなのかもしれません。

The Association of Teaching English through Multimedia (ATEM) has undergone many changes in the past decade, including changing the name from “through Movies” to “through Multimedia.” These changes are indicative of the changing times and evolving teaching landscape. With this, I have noticed several emerging research topics that I think our members can, and should, look into, but that not many of us seem to be picking up. In this post, I would like to encourage some members to go after some of these new and exciting areas, explaining what they are and why I feel they are important. In no particular order:

<Culture / Literature Related>

1. Comparative culture studies between originals and remakes

While I have seen ATEM members teach about culture through films and other sorts of media, I still see many papers that use a rather old lens to look at more modern cinema. Recently, Hollywood has been producing ever more remakes of and sequels to earlier films (e.g., Disney keeps making real-life remakes of their animated classics, and it seems that every movie popular in the 80s and 90s is getting a sequel or remake that no one asked for). Though the motivation for this is likely profit driven, at least in part, remakes and sequels offer a chance to compare the atmosphere and culture in the country from the original to the remake. While I have seen some of our members notice this, they often stop short at looking at the similarities rather than pointing out the glaring differences and what those implicate about the change in society.

2. Observing the cultural influence of the global market on Hollywood and digital media

Since Hollywood movies gain so much attention, it is not surprising that they are analyzed and used in English teaching as much as they are. One lens from which movies have often been analyzed is as good glimpse into public thought or general ideas of the time of the culture which produced the film. For example, when a county experiences periods of financial or social unease, horror or monster films often become popular (e.g., the German monster films of the 1920s, the Japanese kaiju films of the 1950s and 60s, etc.; Reimer & Reimer, 1992). However, in more recent times, Hollywood films are often changed drastically in order to appeal to a global audience, as opposed to an American one. With this in mind, do Hollywood movies really reflect American ideas and public thought anymore? Furthermore, as the country becomes increasingly divided since the early 2010s, do any films truly represent general though in America anymore?

<Education Related>

3. Innovative uses of multimedia in the English classroom

While ATEM originally focused on just the use of movies in the classroom, there are increasing chances for students to engage with a range of multimedia, and I would encourage more studies on this. Specifically, there is still much room to focus on student-created multimedia as a means of learning (e.g., Spring, 2020a), uses of short video clips presented through streaming platforms (e.g., Ramsden, 2020), and manipulations of text, videos, images, and music to create more interactive experiences (e.g. Nakamura et al., 2024). Now that ATEM focuses on a range of multimedia and it is becoming ever-easier to implement media usage both in the classroom and at home as part of extra studying or flipped-learning, more study will be needed in these areas as well. For example, some burning questions that do not have definitive answers include: Should subtitles be used or not? Does it depend on the level? Should students slow down videos if they find them too fast, or re-watch? Are listening activities better as videos? If so, does it matter what is shown in the video? For example, if students are listening to a lecture about turtles, is it better to have no video, video of a lecturer, video of turtles, or images and text? Do certain patterns promote learning or become a crutch? If we use videos outside of the classroom as part of flipped-learning, how do we ensure that students watch them? How do we turn video watching into a more interactive activity? All of these areas need ever more exploring and the results should eventually be amalgamated via meta-analyses and scoping reviews.

4. Focusing on differences in improvement when teaching English through multimedia

As teachers, our own students often become our participants, making our research quasi-experimental. One common way to test if a method is working is to use pre-/post-testing with a control and experimental group. However, if a teacher truly believes one method to be inferior, is it ethical to give one group of students a worse class to see if it is truly worse? Furthermore, how do we keep research bias out of the results in this case? More importantly, whether or not scores increase on average, there is always variance in how much students improve. I believe a more important question to try to answer when conducting educational studies is why some students improve more than others. By investigating this question instead, we can also see how valid our teaching methods are and what areas we need to improve. This sort of study can be conducted with pre- and post-tests and either regression analyses (e.g., Spring & Takeda, 2024) or repeated ANOVA with covariates (e.g., Spring, 2020b), or even by looking for common themes between our top and bottom improvers (e.g., Spring et al., 2019). If conducting regression analyses, it is a good idea to use the delta scores (post-test minus pre-test) as the dependent variable and include pre-test scores as a means of counteracting the effect of previous knowledge. Furthermore, when conducting these analyses, consider using dominance analysis for best results (Mizumoto, 2023). You can find free tools for doing this here or here: <Mizumoto Tool>, <Spring Tool>

5. The use of video materials as part of testing

Recently, some studies have suggested that using videos to test listening comprehension may be superior to using audio files alone (e.g., Kim, 2023; Suvarov, 2015). Part of the rationale is that video tests are more authentic (when do we close our eyes when talking to others?), and part of the rationale is that the videos provide more context via their visual cues, which ensures that we are testing listening ability and not the ability to conjecture what situation two speakers are in from audio clues alone. This areas is both extremely understudied, but also well within the scope of ATEM.

<Linguistics Related>

6. Checking for linguistic change in spoken English

Thanks to the movie corpus (Davies, 2019), it is easier than ever to conduct corpus studies on linguistic elements and match these to dates when they emerge and how frequent they are in particular decades. As should be apparent to any linguist, language is always changing and evolving. As movies tend to be a good gauge for commonly known and understood spoken registers, they can also be used to track changes in the English language. Not only is this good for finding out the latest trends in slang and new expressions, but it can also help us to know when certain expressions and turns of phrase have begun to fade away. A good example is of the past tense of the verb “dream” in American English. While both “dreamt” and “dreamed” were both quite common up until the 1950s, the former began to fall out of usage, and is rarely used in recent times. However, I’m sure this is not the only change, as I often notice differences in my own vernacular and that of my parents and older generations.

7. Linking linguistic examples to SLA

Many linguistics papers have been published in the ATEM journal that apply theory to actual examples found in visual media, such as movies. However, more work is still required to point out the benefits of teaching these discoveries from a second language acquisition (SLA). For example, it could prove beneficial to find examples of theoretically difficult to parse syntactic or semantic structures from film and visual media and then test how well students are able to understand these expressions when presented with them. While we often assume that students have some syntactic or semantic knowledge, SLA studies that test students’ ability to parse or understand such structures do not always produce results congruent with our assumptions. This is especially true in the context of visual media, as the various context clues from the visual media may actually provide students with the extra information required for them to understand the supposedly difficult structures. Therefore, I believe work is warranted as to which are difficult to understand both with and without visual media, what the differences in these types are. This may help further our understanding of the types of visual media that we need to use to help students understand linguistically difficult structures more easily. This potentially overlaps with suggestion (5).

It is my hope that by suggesting some of these potential topics and tools, ATEM members can potentially branch out into new topics or use their pre-existing knowledge to help solve some of these mysteries. I also encourage new, young researchers to pick up some of these topics and areas, and potentially reach out to me or other, more senior ATEM members for help. There are a lot of possibilities and potential in our field, and yet, much of it remains unexplored. I implore the next generation or researchers and educators to begin looking into these topics, and the current and older generations of researchers and educators to help the next generations to develop the skills to research these topics in depth and present their results so that we may all benefit from their findings.

References and Suggested Readings

Davies, M. (2019) The Movie Corpus. Available online at https://www.english-corpora.org/movies/.

Kim, J. (2023, September 15). Test takers’ interaction with context videos in a video-based listening test: A conceptual replication and extension of Suvorov (2015). https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/r83by

Nakamura, S., Spring, R, & Sakurai, S. (2024) The impact of ASR-based interactive video activities on speaking skills: Japanese EFL learners’ perceptions.　TESL-EJ, 27(4). https://doi.org/10.55593/ej.27108a5

Ramsden, T. (2020). Jiritsuteki gakushu o unagasu jugyogai gakushu no kokoromi: YouTube bideo report [An attempt at encouraging autonomous study outside of the classroom: YouTube video reports]. ATEM Journal, 25, 17–30. https://doi.org/10.24499/atemnew.25.0_17

Reimer, R., & Reimer, C. (1992) Nazi-retro film: How German narrative cinema remembers the past. Twayne.

Mizumoto, A. (2023). Calculating the relative importance of multiple regression predictor variables using dominance analysis and random forests. Language Learning, 73(1), 161–196. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12518

Spring, R. (2020a). Can Video-creation Project Work Affect Students’ Oral Proficiency? An Analysis of Fluency, Complexity and Accuracy. TESL-EJ, 24(2). http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume24/ej94/ej94a1/

Spring, R. (2020b). Maximizing the benefits of video-creation PBLL in the EFL classroom: A preliminary analysis of factors associated with improvement in oral proficiency. STEM Journal, 21(4), 107–126. https://doi.org/10.16875/stem.2020.21.4.107

Spring, R., & Takeda, J. (2024). Teaching phrasal verbs and idiomatic expressions through multimodal flashcards. STEM Journal, 25(2), 40–53. https://doi.org/10.16875/stem.2024.25.2.40

Spring, R., Kato, F., & Mori, C. (2019). Factors associated with improvement in oral fluency when using Video-Synchronous Mediated Communication with native speakers: An analysis of 3 years of data from a Skype partner program. Foreign Language Annals, 52(1), 87–100. https://doi.org/10.1111/flan.12381

Suvorov, R. (2015). The use of eye tracking in research on video-based second language (L2) listening assessment: A comparison of context videos and content videos. Language Testing, 32(4), 463–483. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265532214562099

日影尚之  麗澤大学

　『ブレードランナー2049』や『デューン 砂の惑星』などでも知られるドゥニ・ヴィルヌーヴ監督のSF映画『メッセージ』(Arrival, 2016)について少し考えてみたいと思います。この映画の始まりと終わりは、同じ悲壮な弦楽曲にオーバーラップする主人公の言語学者Louise Banksの語りで繋がっています。プロット的には、宇宙船で地球の12か所に同時にやってきたまま宙でじっとしているエイリアン（heptapod）たちに対して、Louise が謙虚な態度で文字によるコミュニケーションを積み重ねながら、彼らの言語（つまり外国語）を学んでいきます。新しい言語を学ぶことは思考方法（Louise に関して言えばその時間認識や「原因ー＞結果」などの固定観念）を変える（複眼化する）ことであり、次第に彼らのメッセージに気づいていき、大切なことばを知る/思い出す/伝えることで人類を戦争の危機から救うことになります。
　

エイリアン（alien：見知らぬ相手、馴染みのない存在、異なる者、外国人、宇宙人などの意味）に対して、Louise の方は必要以上に怖がることなく、防護服（鎧兜）を脱いでコミュニケーションを取ろうとするのに対して、「見知らぬ存在」を極度に警戒し、軍事力を誇示したり、勝敗や敵味方などの二項対立的思考（zero-sum game）にとらわ
れたりする軍および安全保障関係者（主として男性たち）の態度が対照的です。同じように、エイリアンが言う“weapon”を「武力」ととらえ、警戒と敵対関係・分断を強める地球各国の指導者に対して、そういう意味ではない、信頼と協力の方向に舵を切るようにと人類が異星人に教えられる経験をします。
　

　しかし、異星人とのコミュニケーションを通じてLouiseの人生には、物理学者Ianとのロマンスが生まれます。Hannahという回文のような名前をつけられた、やがて生まれ若くして亡くなるらしい娘のビジョンをはさんで、エイリアンたちの真意を理解しようと奮闘するLouiseの姿は、一人の人間として、先の運命を知っていてもその娘を産み育てる選択をする（そのことを受け容れた上で日々を生きていこうとする）物語にもなっています。映画の最後に主人公が語る静かな決意 “Despite knowing the journey and where it leads, I embrace it, and welcome every moment of it.”（どうなるかがわかっていたとしても、人生の瞬間瞬間を大切に生きていく）は、Everett Hamner (2017)が示唆するように、例えば、遺伝子研究の進展やそれに基づく確立的データの蓄積などにより、未来がある程度の確率で予想できるかもしれない時代を生きる我々が、そうした情報をどう受け止め、どう生きていくのかについて考えるヒントになるのかもしれません。

主要参考文献
Hamner, Everett. (2017). Editing the Soul: Science and Fiction in the Genome Age.
Pennsylvania State University Press.